Collected Stories of William Faulkner

This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds listeners of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets. Among the 42 selections in this audiobook are such classics as "A Bear Hunt", "A Rose for Emily", "Two Soldiers", and "The Brooch".

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

This now classic book revealed Flannery O’Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy.

A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

Mississippi author Eudora Welty, the first living writer to be published in the Library of America series, mentored many of today's greatest fiction writers and is a fascinating woman, having lived the majority of the 20th century (1909-2001). Her life reflects a century of change and is closely entwined with many events that mark our recent history. This biography follows this 20th-century path while telling Welty's story, beginning with her parents and their important influence on her reading and writing life.

Delta Wedding: A Novel

Set on the Mississippi Delta in 1923, this story captures the mind and manners of the Fairchilds, a large aristocratic family, self-contained and elusive as the wind. The vagaries of the Fairchilds are keenly observed, and sometimes harshly judged, by nine-year-old Laura McRaven, a Fairchild cousin who takes The Yellow Dog train to the Delta for Dabney Fairchild’s wedding.

Everything That Rises Must Converge

This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O'Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment.

Wise Blood

Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.

The Violent Bear It Away

The orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousin, Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle - that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop. A series of struggles ensue, as Tarwater fights an internal battle against his innate faith and the voices calling him to be a prophet, while Rayber tries to draw Tarwater into a more “reasonable” modern world. Both wrestle with the legacy of their dead relatives and lay claim to Bishop's soul.

Light in August

An Oprah's Book Club Selection regarded as one of Faulkner's greatest and most accessible novels, Light in August is a timeless and riveting story of determination, tragedy, and hope. In Faulkner's iconic Yoknapatawpha County, race, sex, and religion collide around three memorable characters searching desperately for human connection and their own identities.

The Complete Stories of Anton Chekhov, Vol. 1: 1882–1885

A Russian author, playwright, and physician, Anton Chekhov is widely considered one of the best short-story writers of all time. Having influenced such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and James Joyce, Chekhov’s stories are often noted for their stream-of-consciousness style and their vast number.

Commonwealth

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Essential Welty

In 1956, Caedmon had the great fortune to record Eudora Welty reading some of her finest stories. In her sweetly vibrant Mississippi drawl, Ms. Welty deftly draws the listener in to the uproariously multilayered "Why I Live at the P.O.", the spontaneous "Powerhouse", and the insightful voice of women's truths in "Petrified Man". Ms. Welty's reading brings immediacy and resonance to these wonderful tales.

The Sound and the Fury

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling", the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers: the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin, and the monstrous Jason.

The Ponder Heart

Originally published in The New Yorker in 1954, The Ponder Heart is easily Eudora Welty’s most comic novel, a lighthearted burlesque that rivals Caldwell’s Tobacco Road for capturing rural idioms, and the novels of Mark Twain for high farce.

The Complete Stories of Anton Chekhov, Vol. 2: 1886

Anton Chekhov is widely considered one of the best short-story writers of all time. Having influenced such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and James Joyce, Chekhov’s stories are often noted for their stream-of-consciousness style and their vast number. Raymond Carver once said, “It is not only the immense number of stories he wrote - for few, if any, writers have ever done more - it is the awesome frequency with which he produced masterpieces, stories that shrive us as well as delight and move us, that lay bare our emotions in ways only true art can accomplish.”

The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)

The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

News of the World: A Novel

In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

The Age of Innocence

Countess Olenska, separated from her European husband, returns to old New York society. She bears with her an independence and anawareness of life which stirs the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, engaged to be married to May Welland.

Go Tell It On the Mountain

James Baldwin’s stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America. Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, Baldwin chronicles a 14-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.

My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

From celebrated New York Times best-selling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Rick Bragg comes a poignant and wryly funny collection of essays on life in the South. Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, Bragg explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast.

The Elephant in the Room: A Journey into the Trump Campaign and the "Alt-Right"

'But Hillary is a known Luciferian,' he tried. 'She's not a known Luciferian,' I said. 'Well, yes and no,' he said. In The Elephant in the Room, Jon Ronson, the New York Times best-selling author of The Psychopath Test, Them, and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, travels to Cleveland at the height of summer to witness the Republican National Convention.

Justine: The Alexandria Quartet

Set amid the corrupt glamour and multiplying intrigues of Alexandria, Egypt, in the 1930s and 1940s, the novels of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet (of which this is the first) follow the shifting alliances - sexual, cultural and political - of a group of quite varied characters. In Justine, an English schoolmaster and struggling writer falls in love with a beautiful and mysterious Jewish woman who is married to a wealthy Egyptian.

A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

Publisher's Summary

This complete collection includes all of the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are 41 stories in all, including those in the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories.

What the Critics Say

"Eudora Welty is one of our purest, finest, gentlest voices, and this collection is something to be treasured." (Anne Tyler, Washington Star)

"The richness of such talent resists a summing up.... She is always honest, always just. And she is vastly entertaining. The stories are magnificent." (Maureen Howard, The New York Times Book Review)

“An expansive cast of performers delivers Welty’s 41 published stories. While all the performances are strong…it is the female narrators who shine on these recordings. Their voices are especially capable of performing the acrobatics involved in the social maneuverings of Welty’s steel magnolias. Dialogue is nuanced—many exchanges sound so authentic that it’s almost as if the listener is watching a play rather than hearing prose. Welty’s unique stories of hope, love, and redemption are enlivened by all the performers on this extensive collection.” (AudioFile)

(I've given fewer stars for performance, because some performances here are better than others). Based on what I've been hearing on this recording, Eudora Welty may be the best American writer of the 20th Century. (For me, for my taste) Hard to tell. So I've got to read her on the page. I've bought this book, now, from Amazon. I can't listen to it anymore because I want to constantly stop, go back, and read stuff over, asking, "WHAT did she just say?!." I can't believe an American writer I haven't read before (I'm old and I've been reading all my life) can be so impossibly good. Usually I LISTEN to books to escape. Audio is fine for that. But this is escape of a different kind entirely. It's a glimpse into the real world made magical by descriptions that make you catch your breath. I may change my mind after pursuing her onto the page. I don't think so, though.

I was initially appalled by the arch and phoney accent of the initial narrator reading Welty's preface. Happily most of the readings are better than that, some of them actually quite good. The stories themselves, it it almost needless to say, are varied and splendid.

I have read and listened to 'The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty', not all in one go, a few or one at a time, between novels or for a break, in a car on NPR, and on a plane to escape my seat companion, and I am always taken completely from myself into a world of word as music. The common and tragic tales of survivors, living as best they do, in the chaos of being alive.The narrators are not all meant to be reading these stories to us, sadly, as much as they may love the author, but don't let those few stop you from purchasing this excellent collection. You will be transported!

What did you like best about The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty? What did you like least?

The collection is exhaustive, covering her entire portfolio. It is purposefully inclusive of her impressive span of writing. That being said, Eudora tends to leave her story endings as wide open as her eyes always were. Short stories with great characters and fantastic depth play across the pages, make you care who they are, what they feel. Then, snap, Eudora changes stories and her characters are left hanging in the air. I suppose even that is the mark of a fantastic story-teller. What's better than a lively character who is unresolved? Well, perhaps a lively character who is resolved. Still, she makes you come back for more.

Would you be willing to try another book from Eudora Welty? Why or why not?

Yes. In fact, I have several volumes of her works in writing.

Would you listen to another book narrated by the narrators?

Some of them. Others were not enjoyable at all in context with a SOUTHERN writer. A southern drawl is completely necessary when reading Eudora Welty aloud...

Do you think The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

She did plenty of that.

Any additional comments?

Would be a great tool for teachers, if teachers are still allowed to teach creative writing.

What did you like best about The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty? What did you like least?

I love Eudora Welty's writing and read this same book several years ago. Since I enjoyed it enormously, I thought it would be a good audible selection at this time, when I am recuperating from a surgery that makes it difficult for me to hold a book. In retrospect, Ms. Welty's stories are more suited to the printed page, where one can linger on the beautiful descriptions of nature and keep track of the enormous number of characters (many of whom have delightfully peculiar names). Still, I listened to the entire book --nearly 40 hours!--and was able to take pleasure in the soothing flow and rhythm of both the writing and the narration.

Finally on "Good Reads" I found a few other people who had the courage to admit they really didn't like Welty. I majored in English. Well, not at a very good school. My dad drove a Mercedes but didn't see fit to send me to USC. Anyway, now I'm old and have nothing to prove. I'm here for enjoyment, thank you! I'm spoiled by Diana Gabaldon, Alexandre Dumas, Bryce Courtenay and so many other wonderful story-tellers. I love long novels, but I don't think it's the short story form that's the problem. I enjoy Hemingway and O. Henry very much! No, I think Welty is an intellectual snob, and too many people are reluctant to say they don't get it or find no resonance. Well, I was stationed in Mississippi and found it almost a foreign country compared to California. I really should have known I would not like this. Barbara Rosenblatt must be a wonderful actress because she manages that nauseating down home accent like a native. So ugly! Oh, yeah, it's subtle! So subtle I'm nodding off. No, I don't get it and while I realize "it" may be there somewhere, I'm not willing to use a nutpick to pull "it" out. Not when the man knifed his pregnant wife or the little girl tipped on over into the rain barrel. I don't relish insanity or off-the-wall sicko. Whimsical or surprising would have been nice. The story about Aaron Burr is faintly interesting, also the point of view of the deaf boy who apparently had been taught to read before he lost his folks. All in all, thus far I feel that Welty thinks she can share the entirety of her weird mind with the whole world whether or not we find it uplifting or exciting or funny.

Years ago when "In Cold Blood" appeared in New Yorker magazine, I chanced on it and could not put it down. Yes, that was violent and twisted and horrible -- and also well-written, but based on true events. I really enjoyed that writing. Somehow, this Welty stuff is different for me -- or I'm different now.

I've read and enjoyed all the Sarah Orne Jewett stories as print books. She is subtle and moves very slowly, but with normalcy and oftentimes some humor. Many people would say that's like watching paint dry, but . . . remember the elderly poor trying to refurbish their best bonnets?

The silent space between these stories is way too short! Maddening! No time to stop in between. Hard to tell when Welty has arrived at her too darned subtle endings. One of the male narrators drops words in a terribly sensitive way but if I can't hear the word, I won't get the story! I have no problem with non-Southerners reading this material. In fact, that was better for me. If you enjoy un-beautiful Mississippi "beauty"-shop conversation -- and I don't! -- you'll love Barbara Rosenblatt's reading. All that what-will-people-think small-town stuff and people getting in a snit and . . . I'm bailing. Good-bye!